campaign donor search engine

This is a neat site: http://www.newsmeat.com/

It lets you do searches to see what political campaign contributions (of $200 or more) an individual has made. You can search by name or zip code. I'm even in there, because I donated to the Green Party a few times!

There's also an interesting chart on the right side of the page, showing the current number of casualties, troop deployment, and money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the list of popular searches, Harrison Ford is currently at the top... his donations are sort of interesting - in 1999, he donated to both Al Gore's and John McCain's presidential campaigns.

local elections

We're having a primary election here on Tuesday, so I've been looking up info on some of the candidates.

In one of the county council races, the incumbent sounds pretty good. But the challenger sounds great too. He's the founder of an organization which implements projects to help communities reduce crime. Now, just doing a search on his name, I also find local news stories about him helping neighbors install security cameras in their yards to help catch vandals, and that he's offered to donate one of his kidneys to a friend who needs a transplant!

(no subject)

Remember last year when I mentioned buying some green potatoes? After reading about the toxicity of green potatos, I decided to throw most of them out - into my compost. This year, potato plants were growing out of my compost pile. Yesterday, since the plants had died, I dug them up to see what I would find, and I got a handful or so of several little baby-potatos! :-) Most are marble-sized (both small and big marbles), but a couple are larger, the size of a prune or small egg.